Team USA Wins the World Aquatics Team Trophy in Swimming at the 2025 World Championships

The United States has once again won the World Aquatics Championships Trophy, which is the official ‘team championship’ of World Aquatics meets.

The scoring system rewards the top 16 finishers in each individual event and the top 8 finishers in each relay event and attempts to account for an overall performance of each country. This differs from the medals table, which are often the public focus but give a heavy weight to a gold medal and no weight to a 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th place finish.

While the U.S. dominance of the medals table has faltered in recent years, the country is still the deepest team in the world. Their margin of 185 points ahead of Australia and 199 points ahead of China is a smaller margin than the last full-field World Championships in 2023, where the U.S. didn’t have the most gold medals. There, the U.S. was 198 points ahead of Australia.

The raw number is also much lower – 842 versus the 1,082 they scored in Fukuoka in 2023. That is largely owed to illnesses and underperformances that lead to either scratches or swimmers not even making semifinals, meaning more ’empty swims’ than in the past.

The return of Russian athletes also had a big impact on the point distribution at the top, as they are one of the deepest teams in the world. The “Neutral Athletes B” roster, which is athletes from Russia, finished 5th.

Those places and points were redistributed to a relatively-diverse field. Germany, for example, finished 10th in the trophy standings in both 2023 and 2025. They scored only 225 points in 2023, but 301 in 2025. While the distribution curve changed, the same exact number of countries scored points as 2023: 50.

Italy was a big mover up the table. They tied-for-7th in 2023, but finished 4th in 2025, though they were a clear jump behind the lead pack. Great Britain, meanwhile, slid from 4th to 7th.

Other noteworthy movements:

• In spite of the efforts by 50 and 100 fly silver medalist Noe Ponti, Switzerland fell 15th in 2023 to 27th in 2025. While Ponti was brilliant, his countrymates like Antonio Djakovic, Lisa Mamie, and 2023 200 backstroke bronze medalist Roman Mityukov were not as good, plus they sent only five swimmers versus the eight from 2023.
• The host nation Singapore finished 34th in the team trophy this year after not scoring in 2023.

Scoring system

• Individual Event Places 1 – 16: 18, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 point

• Relay Places 1 – 8: 36, 32, 30, 28, 26, 24, 22, 20 points.

Overall Standings

Ranked By Men

Ranked By Women